Without question, 2007 was a great year for Apple, with the launch of Mac OS X 10.5, the iPhone, and the iPod Touch. But even with the new car smell lingering on these products, there are still a number of long-standing wishes and needs that Apple has yet to address. This year's edition of my "What I want from Apple" list outlines my top priorities, as well as my predictions for what we'll see at next week's Macworld Expo.

1. More Support For IT (Without Worrying About Becoming An 'Enterprise' Company).

Apple has said in various ways since the return of Jobs that they are not an enterprise company. Fair enough, I'll agree with that, they aren't. I'm glad for that, as being an enterprise company would do bad things to their ability to be, well, Apple.

However, there is nothing discordant about making it easier to support Apple products in higher education, K-12, and the small and midsize business market. I'm not talking about "ease of use" issues either. I'm talking about far more mundane things. For example, a clear policy regarding when older OSes are no longer actively supported. We can guess based on the past, but there's nothing that actually says so. There are K-12 districts with tens of thousands of machines. There are college campuses with similar numbers. The small and midsize business market may not typically include that many machines, but running a few hundred systems is not something you "just do."

The people running these systems are dealing with many of the same issues as their enterprise brethren, but Apple still seems to be in the mindset that IT is a "necessary evil," and their IT support structure shows it. It's especially annoying in the small and midsize business area, a new focus for Apple. "Just talk to your rep" is a little hard when, unlike those in K-12 and higher ed, you don't necessarily know who your rep is, or if you even have one.

If Apple really wants to succeed in the SMB market, and I think they do, then they need to start taking the needs of IT in the SMB market as a chance to forge relationships, not just some albatross around their neck. A good start would be to imitate Microsoft, and create an Apple version of Technet, which is a fantastic, IT/support-focused resource for people using Microsoft products. TechNet has been a major win for Microsoft, with good reason, and Apple would do well to implement its own version.

True, Apple does have an IT Pro site, but it's never been much more than a marketing site with some links. I'm glad they link to things like Nessus and Snort, but what's needed are articles talking about using those products on Mac OS X. Snort in particular, is not an easy application to set up, but there's nothing from Apple that could help, such as sample configuration settings for "standard" Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server traffic so that you can more easily teach Snort what is "normal." Apple already has the IT Pro site, why not turn it into a resource that goes far beyond just getting IT pros to buy Mac OS X?

Another issue here, one that crops up on various mailing lists, is the difficulty of getting site licenses for Apple products. No IT person, heck, no company wants to deal with the headaches of multiple serial numbers for the same product. Yet that's what Apple forces on you, or makes it dashedly hard to avoid. If I have to order a copy of say, iWork for my entire company, and I have, say a couple hundred users, why not just give me a site license? One serial number. Better yet, give me an option to pay a bit more and let my users install iWork at home too? Final Cut Studio, whatever?

Why make it harder than it should be to purchase and install a lot of Apple products? I'm not talking about some Microsoftian labyrinth of licensing and versioning here, just options for people with a bunch of Macs that don't involve special assistance from an Apple sales rep. This kind of thing drives sales, why wouldn't this be available now?